Professor Pieter S Kritzinger

Member of the Academic Staff

Fields of Interest

Modeling concurrent systems and traceability in software documentation

Email: psk [at] cs [dot] uct [dot] ac [dot] za

I obtained an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1972. Subsequently I became a Research Assistant Professor for 2 years in the Computer Science Department at Waterloo. This was followed by 2 years of teaching at the Department of Computing, of Imperial College in London before returning to South Africa to become a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University. In July 1985, after spending the previous year as a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory I was invited to join the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a Full Professor, a post I still hold.

During my tenure at UCT I have spent several periods of study leave at inter alia, the Universität Dortmund, Universität Erlangen, the Institut National des Télécommunications (INT) in Evry, France and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

I am a member of IFIP WG 6.1, 6.3 and 7.3 and have been on the Technical Programming Committee of several international conferences. In 1996 I was elected a Senior Member of the IEEE and in 2007 I was asked to represent South Africa on the IFIP Technical Committee for Telecommunications (IFP TC 6).

I am the founder of the Data Network Architectures (DNA) Group which, through the years has had or still have formal research cooperation agreements with INT and IBM Research in Zurich. The research of the Group is largely funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the national Technical and Human Resources for Industry Program (THRIP) with Nokia-Siemens Communications (South Africa) and TELKOM as industry partners.

Apart from a book on Petri net Theory (Second Edition, 2002) written with Falko Bause of the University of Dortmund, I am the author or co-author of 43 national and international refereed publications. I have supervised or co-supervised 3 PhD students and 23 Masters students and was Head of the Computer Science Department from 1987 to 1996. My full CV can be found here.

Research and Publications

The research I am currently involved in with the graduate students I supervise, constitute the following subfields, namely

Stochastic Modeling

Work in this field originally involved Petri nets (1) and their application as well as methods for reducing the size of state spaces using clever hashing techniques (2) or multi-terminal Binary Decision Diagrams (3). The work recently completed with Jesse Landman (4) was a very interesting exercise in accounting for radio channel behavior in analyzing the performance of UMTS systems.

Modeling concurrent communicating systems such as wireless networks involves a machine model as well as a workload model. In terms of the latter the recent thesis work of both Walters (5) and Sikalinda (6) are relevant. An example where our experience in modeling both the machine and its workload is reported in (7).

Formal Specification Methods

While originally working with Estelle we have since developed software tools for UML and its application for the quantitative analysis of systems (8). A formal way of analyzing USE Cases can be read in (9).

Software Engineering

This is a recent filed of interest for us which came about because of the increased use of formal specification methods in developing automated performance models of systems. Only just completed in December 2007 is a project by Hans-Peter Krüger to apply Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for tracing changes in the documentation during the SDLC. A very preliminary report about this can be found in (10).

Relevant Publications

(1)	with F. Bause, "Introduction to Stochastic Petri Net Theory". Vieweg Verlag, Germany in the series Advanced Studies in Computer Science, 250 pages. Second Edition, 2002, ISBN 3-528-05535-9.

(2)	with W. Knottenbelt and P.G. Harrison and M.A. Mestern, "A probabilistic dynamic technique for the distributed generation of very large state spaces". Performance Evaluation, Volume 39, Issue 1-4, February 2000, 127 -- 148.

(3)	with I. Davies and W. Knottenbelt, "Symbolic Methods for the State Space Exploration of GSPN Models". Proc. XIIth Conference on Modeling Techniques and Tools for Performance Evaluation, T. Field et al., London, (2002), 188 -- 199, Springer Verlag, ISBN 3-540-43539-5.

(4)	with J Landman, "Delay Analysis of Downlink IP Traffic on UMTS Mobile Networks". Performance Evaluation, Issue 1 - 4, October 2005, pp. 68 –82.

(5)	Walters, Lourens. "A Web Browsing Workload for Simulation". MSc, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.

(6)	Sikalinda, Paul. "Analyzing Storage System Workloads". MSc, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.

(7)	with Pileggi, Paolo. "Performance Modeling of the Wireless Internet". In Proceedings Wireless Rural and Emergency Communication Conference 2007, Rome, Italy.

(8)	with N. de Wet. “Using UML Models for the Performance Analysis of Network Systems”. Computer Networks, 2005.

(9)	with O. Ryndina. "Improving Requirements Specification for Communication Services with Formalized Use Case Models". In Proceedings Southern African Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2004, Spier Wine Estate.

(10)	with Krueger, Hans-Peter. “Latent Semantic Indexing as a Technique for Discovering Traceability Links”. In Proceedings Southern African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC 2006), Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Current Graduate Students

Hans-Peter Krueger is about to hand in his dissertation about the application of LSI in automatically finding links in software documentation in the SDLC.
Andrew Symington is in the second year of his Masters study and is using a hardware test bed to verify the accuracy of analytic models in representing fully connected, error-free 802.11 networks.
Paolo Pileggi started his Masters studies in 2008 and will investigate ways of modeling QoS in heterogeneous 802.11 and 802.16 wireless networks.

Other Interests

I enjoy fine wines, good cigars and creative cooking and am interested in why and what make an individual who (s)he is. I also like the saying attributed to Albert Einstein that he knows only two things which are infinite: The universe and the stupidity of people, but that he is not so sure about the first.